1970's - Trips and Significant Events
I count myself as very lucky to have grown up in the 1960's and 1970's.In 1970 I was 13 years old, still a boy, by 1980 I was 23, gradually waking up.
It was quite a decade. I loved and still love music so starting with T.Rex through Black Sabbath, Wishbone Ash, Elton John, David Bowie, Rod Stewart, Roxy Music, Bruce Springsteen, Dire Straits, The Eagles and latterly Queen. Liverpool were completely dominant and Wales had one of the greatest teams of all time.
By 1980 I had finished school, built a car, learned to drive, graduated and was extremely fortunate to start working life at Littlewoods. Littlewoods were the largest privately owned company in Britain then and employed 36,000 people. I started work at their head office in Liverpool. The company had a well deserved reputation for being excellent at training. I was a management trainee and so was the recipient of a great deal of it.The training I received there was second to none, I had nothing to compare it to so I had no idea at the time how fortunate I was. The knowledge and skills gained there became the rock on which my church (career) was built.
1970 Larne
(Stormont, Dublin, Waterford, Giants Causeway)
and
Oberammergau
Germany (Ardennes, Luxemburg, Nancy, Col Du Bonhomme, Zurich, Pertisau, Achensee, Innsbruck, Salzberg, Berchesgaden, Chiemsee, Kitzbuhel, Augsberg, Ostend.
In 1970 we took two trips, one to Larne in Ireland including a trip to Waterford home of cut glass, one of my mother's favourites along with Wedgewood.The second trip, with members of the church, was to Oberammergau in Germany.Oberammergau is the home of the passion play.
'According to legend, an outbreak of bubonic plague devastated Bavaria during the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648). Bad Kohlgrub was so depopulated that only two married couples remained alive. The village of Oberammergau remained plague-free until 25 September 1633, when a man named Kaspar Schisler returned home after working in the nearby village of Eschenlohe. Over the next 33 days, 81 villagers would die, half of Oberammergau's population. On 28 October 1633, the villagers vowed that if God spared them from the plague, they would perform a play every 10 years depicting the life and death of Jesus. Nobody died of plague in Oberammergau after that vow, and the villagers kept their word to God by performing the passion play for the first time in 1634.
The Performance
The production involves over 2,000 performers, musicians and stage technicians, all residents of the village.The play comprises spoken dramatic text, musical and choral accompaniment and tableaux vivants, which are scenes from the Old Testament depicted for the audience by motionless actors accompanied by verbal description. These scenes are the basis for the typology, the interrelationship between the Old and New Testaments, of the play. They include a scene of King Ahasuerus rejecting Vashti in favor of Esther, the brothers selling Joseph into slavery in Egypt, and Moses raising up the nehushtan (bronze serpent) in the wilderness. Each scene precedes that section of the play that is considered to be prefigured by the scene. The three tableaux mentioned are presented to the audience as prefiguring Christianity superseding Judaism, Judas selling information on the location of Jesus, and the crucifixion of Jesus.'
1971 Lindisfarne! (Morecambe, Durham, Hadrian's Wall, Holy Island, Fountains Abbey)
In 1971 someone had the brilliant idea of sending a group of teenagers on a pilgrimage to Lindisfarne and so created one of the most memorable episodes of my life.Hello Lesley Kennedy.
My father wrote in the parish magazine...
1972 Dad becomes a Canon at Chester Cathedral
Early to mid 1970's
1972 Westendorf Austria
1975 Dad becomes the Archdeacon of Chester (Wirral North, Wirral South, Wallasey, Birkenhead, Chester, Frodsham, Great Budworth, Malpas, Middlewich)
What was going on in the world at large ?
- 1970: Edward Heath becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.Maiden flight of the Boeing 747. Deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.
- 1971:Internment begins in Northern Ireland. Invention of the microchip. Idi Amin comes to power in Uganda.
- 1972: Northern Ireland's Bloody Sunday; Munich massacre occurs at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany.
- 1973: Beginning of the Watergate scandal. First space station, Skylab, is launched. First close-up images of Jupiter.
- 1974: First close-up images of Mercury.World population reaches 4 billion. Resignation of Richard Nixon.
- 1975: End of Vietnam War and Fall of Saigon; death of Francisco Franco; Juan Carlos I becomes King of Spain. Haile Selassie I dies in mysterious circumstances. Dmitri Shostakovich dies. Cambodian Civil War ends with victory for the Khmer Rouge. The Killing Fields murders begin. First Cricket World Cup hosted.
- 1976: First outbreak of the Ebola virus. Death of Mao Zedong. End of Cultural Revolution. Steve Jobs finishes his first significant invention, Apple I.
- 1977: Introduction of the first mass-produced personal computers; launch of the Voyager spacecraft, currently the most distant man-made objects in the universe.Elvis Presley dies August 16th.
- 1978: Invention of artificial insulin;Birth of the first test-tube baby. Cambodian-Vietnamese War begins.
- 1979: Soviet–Afghan War begins. Iranian Revolution and Iran hostage crisis; First close-up images of Saturn. Margaret Thatcher becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Implementation of China's One child policy. Idi Amin exiled from Uganda. Smallpox eradicated. Cambodian-Vietnamese War ends with the overthrow of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime. 1.7 million people known to have been murdered in The Killing Fields.
